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As businesses continue to adjust to the new normal, understanding the long-term effects of the pandemic and the right actions to take is critical. COVID-19 has revealed just how disruptive events can be on “business as usual” and emphasized the need for future planning.

With many countries already re-opening parts of their economy, and the global sentiment toward the future of the COVID-19 pandemic more hopeful, business leaders are still struggling to adopt greater agility to anticipate and mitigate the impact of the upheaval.

At the inception of the lockdown, many businesses entered a firefighting state, which meant doing anything possible to stay afloat, from cutting down on expenses, finding alternative avenues to generate revenue to outright re-thinking of business processes to meet customers’ needs.

Dealing with the pandemic hasn’t been easy for many businesses, especially those in industries directly affected by lockdown measures, such as air travel, hospitality and fitness-related companies.

With the concerns of a possible second wave lingering, it’s essential to learn from businesses who are changing the game in their favour and are achieving incredible goals on how to confront the future and better prepare for any potential emergencies that could come up unexpectedly.

Against this backdrop, Digital Jewels recently hosted the first in the series of the Africa Crises Game Changer, with focus on ‘Weathering The Storm: A CEO Perspective’.

The virtual event which was moderated by Adedoyin Odunfa (CEO, Digital Jewels), had other top African CEO’s like Chizor Malize (MD/CEO, FITC), Bukky George (CEO, HealthPlus Pharmacy), David Morema Obangi (CEO, Virtual Pay International Limited), Charles Anudu (MD/CEO, Swift Networks Nigeria) and Thomas Attah John (MD, GTBank Ghana) on the panel.

Drawing from their individual experiences, the CEO’s provided insights and shared their perspectives on the different practical strategies adopted in weathering the storm and staying ahead of the curve.

Their submission reinforced that successful businesses will find opportunities to learn from the crisis and use their experiences to prepare for future disruptive events.

While sharing her successful strategies hinged on People, Product-mix and e-Commerce / Tele-Sales, Bukky George who runs a top community pharmacy chain stated that, “This pandemic brought quite a lot our way both positive and negative. The first thing that we had to do was acknowledge the negative emotions (fear, anxiety and uncertainties) that the pandemic brought our way. As a strong part of the frontline defence of the health care system in Nigeria, we had to remind ourselves of our vow to apply our knowledge to serve humanity”

While underscoring resilience as a critical success factor, Bukky George stated that one of the lessons learnt is the need to sometimes look inwards to get the job done, as it’s obvious that 3rd party service providers don’t always work.

“And that’s interesting because we’ve been in existence for 21 years and we have used 3rd party providers successfully in the areas of logistics, security, cleaning, etc and they have worked excellently. But as we optimized our ecommerce, we had 3rd party provider managing our ecommerce platform and this was sub-optimal, leading to refunds, which was not the plan. What we had to do was to bring the operations in-house”, she said.

From the stand point of a very dynamic global bank, Thomas Attah John stated that the strategy adopted was around the three key focus areas of Organizational health, Revenue recovery and Risk assessment / management.

On measures taken to combat cybersecurity, Thomas Attah John ascribed the success recorded to the implementation of enterprise-wide risk management operational framework with focus on compliance, security systems and technology in general as a key driver of the digital future of banking.

For Charles Anudu, the realtime nature of the telecommunications business made it highly imperative to swiftly respond to the need of the customers. The immediate step taken to achieve this was engagement of all stakeholders (customers, staff, suppliers, etc), while protecting the human resource requirements, leveraging technology to switch to remote work.

According to him, there were fundamental business changes as a result of new customer behaviour and needs, unprecedented demand, nature of network usage and huge spike in working remotely.

As part of his learning point, Charles Anudu made a strong case for the support and enhancement of talent and work force experience for collaboration and co-creation.

From the perspectives of a fairly large group with operations across Africa, David Morema Obangi acknowledged that some of the existing business revenue models collapsed while others, especially on the fintech side did quite well, leading to prompt re-tweaking and adaptation of some of the business models to ensure viability.

Succinctly highlighting his organization’s winning strategy to be centred on Product delivery, Business model, Team work, Business resumption and continuity, he said “If we thought team work was important before the pandemic, we realized that it became even more now. We had to take out the weakest in the team. We had to bring those who can weather the storm stronger to pick up the weaker ones. So, basically team work became so key to ensure that we continued providing efficient services to our clients”.

In what could be described as a classical case of what happens when preparation meets opportunity, Chizor Malize shared insights on the key vision, strategies (wrapped around five pillars: People, Programmes, Platforms, Processes and Performance) and actions taken by FITC to weather the storm.

‘We started out 2020 extremely excited, delighted and positive about the year. And we had what we will call our key five pillars – and that’s around our Programmes, People, Platforms, Processes and Performance. For us we were looking forward to a year when we are not only going to revamp a lot of our operations but most importantly build upon these pillars to be able to evolve to a world class innovation led organization. And in the midst of all of these optimism enters the global pandemic which basically caught everyone unawares’. So, when you are looking at the pillars and the order of events, it becomes a challenge on how to progress. So, we had to become very creative and innovative in the way we grappled around all of these while keeping our lives and passing through the survival period”, she stated.

On the key survival strategy and lessons learnt, Chizor Malize highlighted collaboration, resilience, adaptability, business continuity and a clear vision.

On the impact of the pandemic in accelerating the digital transformation drive of FITC, she stated that “Remember that one of the things that we have setout to do early in the year was to be able to migrate our operations to digital learning platforms comparable to the best of the learning institutions around the world…and then the pandemic totally, totally helped us to accelerate that vision”.

According to her, the most credible strategy was the deliberate intention to build and position FITC as a market leader across everything with regards to learning.

On how the strategies had informed business outlook, Chizor Malize said, “ To be able to do all of the enormous things that we did in 5 months, we busted all of the silos in the organization. So, first of all, we launched an extremely dynamic and innovative programme called Think Different Initiative “.

It’s evident that a dramatic shift in organizational paradigms and enterprise agility, not merely a twist to crisis management strategies are necessary to learn from the crisis and make needed adjustments to become sufficiently resourceful and versatile. As digital will be key to thriving during the economic recovery and the next normal that will follow.

Digital Jewels Limited is a leading African focused IT Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), Consulting & Capacity Building, firm with deep competencies in Information Security, Information Assurance, Project Management, e-business and Knowledge Capacity Building; with extensive footprints in several African countries.

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